This invention relates generally to telephone communication services, including wired and wireless telephone services, and more particularly to discounted calling groups for subscribers of such services.
Many telephone service providers—both wireless and wired service providers—have offered special “family circle” or “calling circle” plans. In a calling circle plan, a subscriber receives preferential calling rates for telephone calls to and from other members of the subscriber's calling circle. A strong motivation for calling circle plans was to provide an incentive for groups of people to subscribe to the same telephone service provider—namely, the to service provider that was offering the calling circle discount.
A significant limitation to these plans, however, was that the members of the subscriber's calling circle must all be subscribers of the same telephone service. In this way, calling circle plans encouraged new users to subscribe to a particular service while they discouraged existing subscribers from leaving. If subscribers chose the source of their telephone service differently from their family and/or friends, the subscribers' ability to receive preferential rates with their family and/or friends would be lost. The limitation that all members of the calling circle must be subscribers of the same service provider has thus been integrally tied to previous calling circle plans. If those plans did not include this restriction, the plans would be much less effective for achieving the service provider's goals.
But people's relationships, and thus their calling habits, do not naturally align with their telephone service memberships. Whereas limiting the membership of a calling circle to subscribers of the same service provider serves the interests of that service provider, it does not serve the interests of the consumer. For this reason, previous calling circle plans with their restrictions on membership have been inadequate for consumers' needs.